Search form

On Sexual Hypocrisy

"An era can said to be ended when its basic illusions are exhausted." (Arthur Miller)

Nobody likes a hypocrite. But author Robert Wright argues in a recent piece that when it comes to marital infidelity, even more hypocrisy may be precisely what's needed. He writes,

One ingredient of an effective moral system is hypocrisy. Everyone purports to support a rule that many of these people in fact violate, but so long as the violations are rarely publicized, the number of hypocrites doesn’t grow, and the rule — in this case the norm of monogamous fidelity — stays more or less intact; at least, it stays strong enough to keep the whole system of marriage from collapsing.

To be fair, Wright presents this argument at arm's length, not saying whether he really believes it or not. But you've got to wonder: If hypocrisy is an essential element in keeping a system from collapsing – if, in other words, the system is founded on false premises – is this a system worth preserving?

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Pope Urban VIII understood that Galileo was correct in stating that the Earth was revolving around the Sun in 1633, but felt it was better for the Church to keep this truth away from the public for as long as possible (the Vatican finally relented in 1992). What's this tell us about an institution claiming to be devoted to the truth – indeed, to divine truth?

The moral hypocrisy Wright places at the heart of a stable social system would require the participation of leaders in all parts of life. So, in order to maintain this lie, we'd have to accept that our leaders in religion, politics, education, psychotherapy, medicine, law, and the arts would all maintain the lie in order to "protect" the rest of us from the truth. Evolutionary scientists and marital therapists would have to create and enforce a narrative holding that lifelong sexual monogamy is the norm for our species, and that those who stray from this "normal" path are in some way deviant (which is pretty much what they've done). They – and we – would have to be willing to ridicule others for getting caught doing what most of us do, or would if we could, secretly (which is pretty much what we do).

This seems like pretty dubious reasoning to me – reasoning that puts a society or institution on the fast path to illegitimacy. If a social institution can't bear the weight of truth, it should collapse and clear the way for new institutions more adapted to the realities of the epoch.

We live in an time of plummeting public respect for our social institutions. Nothing al Qaeda or China does can come close to the dangers this collapse poses to Western civilization. There is only one way forward. Truth, not hypocrisy, can set us free.

This seems an incorrect use of the word hypocrisy, which is defined as professing beliefs that one in fact does not hold. The popular but wrong take on hypocrisy is that it is "saying one thing and doing another." But beliefs and motivations are important. If someone says infidelity is wrong but doesn't really believe it, they are being hypocritical whether they act on it or not. But if someone says infidelity is wrong, has an affair and feels guilty about it, conflicted about their inability to reconcile beliefs with actions, then that person is not hypocritical.

A society in which everyone says things they don't believe will fall apart. A society in which people say something is wrong, and try to avoid doing that thing, sometimes do it anyway and feel guilty about it, and spend a lot of time an emotion trying to keep themselves and others from doing it again is, well, that's every society.

I like your writing and find a lot of your ideas interesting, but on this one you and Wright are overly simplistic.

Thanks for your comment. Your thoughts reminded me of a blog piece by Paul Krugman, in which he says,

"From [the Republicans'] point of view the cause, the need to police what people do in bed, is, by definition, right, because it’s literally God-given. So the fact that some of those trying to police what other people do in bed are themselves doing nasty things does not reflect on the cause itself — on the contrary, it shows just how necessary more bed-snooping is."

I think you raise a legitimate point. However, if even the most insistent of the defenders of a given approach to life are unable or unwilling at the moment of truth to live that approach, isn't it time to finally reconsider that approach?

What if, rather than sex, we were talking about food and weight? How much credence would you give to a diet doctor who was himself obese? Isn't there a legitimate reason to question the essential soundness of an approach to life if even its most ardent proponents find it impossible to follow in their own lives? Doesn't this suggest that it's time to stop fighting and look for an arrangement that accepts these realities?

I'm reminded of the "war on drugs." At what point do we finally accept that people like to alter their consciousness, have always done so, and will always do so? When do we look inward and question our obsessive need to vanquish something that is essentially human and learn to live with it, rather than persist in an infantile insistence on victory over something that cannot, ultimately, be vanquished?

When the cops are smoking joints, it's high time to legalize marijuana.

I like the drugs example because we in fact have come to accept altering state of mind with some drugs: alcohol, caffeine, khat, etc. Acceptance of Marijuana is in many circles de facto although not in law. How certain drugs get on or off the accepted or taboo lists is usually a matter of history and culture. Many lives have been ruined by heroin or cocaine addictions, but lives have been ruined by alcohol addiction too.

I'm not necessarily arguing that affairs should be taboo, just that the fact that people cannot always live up to their ideals is not necessarily a reason to give up on the ideals. We all say murder is wrong. The fact that people keep murdering each other anyway isn't a reason to say we should just accept it and legalize it.

I think, as with drugs, the damage caused should be the prime consideration in whether infidelity is wrong or not. As with alcohol, some people can handle it and some people can't.

Keep up the blogging. You are always the first person I look for on the PT blogs.

Thanks for your comment and kind words. I agree with you that the damage caused is a primary issue in these matters. But as with drugs, a great deal of the damage is a direct result of our hypocrisy in dealing with reality.

How many heroin overdoses are the direct result of uncontrolled fluctuations in street purity caused by a futile and ill-considered legal (rather than health-care) approach to the problem? A lot. How many teenage pregnancies result from parents' fear of speaking frankly with kids about sex?

My point is that hypocrisy causes a great deal of damage in all these situations.

Murder isn't an example I'd use, because a casual, adults-only affair doesn't necessarily damage anyone. The damage is in how we deal with the situation, not the event itself. So it's far more like throwing a kid in prison for smoking pot than murder. What causes more damage to the kid -- the pot or the prison?

"If a social institution can't bear the weight of truth, it should collapse and clear the way for new institutions more adapted to the realities of the epoch."

This is a big assumption, and it is a moral one, moreover, not a psychological or scientific one. It is assumed that a "lie" at the root of society is wrong, in the first place, and second that we would be better off adapting to the "truth." An additional assumption is also embedded in there by implication: that there are a relatively small number of relevant social truthes and that they do not make conflicting demands. That seems highly unlikely. The opposite, and more-likely-true assumption is, in fact, one of the reasons why hypocrisy is such a good thing, at the macro level, even if it causes pain at the micro (which is why we all do it, and dislike it at the same time: a meta-hypocrisy, if you will).

Society is sufficiently complex so that while we are all obliged to be hypocrites in some areas of life, we also have plenty of opportunity to not be hypocrites.

Regarding the definitional issue: I think its simpler and clearer to designate hypocrisy as a tacit belief that a norm ought to apply to others but not necessarily to oneself. That gets at the notion that people want to live in a world governed by this norm or that, but don't want the inconvenience of obeying it themselves. I think that's what Wright was arguing for, and there's good reason to believe that such behavior supports and spreads social norms, even if it allows people to get away with a few naughtynesses.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Jon. I think it's pretty clear that a lie at the root of a society or a personal relationship is wrong, and that in both cases, adapting to the truth would be an improvement (if not necessarily more comfortable).

The problem with living in a world where the rules apply to others but not to us is that this approach erodes the dignity, and therefore, legitimacy of the very institutions that allow a complex society to function. We're seeing this now in the States. As Obama put it in his State of the Union speech, "We face a deficit of trust."

Indeed we do. But the answer is not a renewal of our determination to uphold ideals we already know to be unrealistic and baseless. Rather, I'd argue that it makes more sense to relax the rules to bring them more into accord with the realities of our capacities.

Truth be told, I agree that something like hypocrisy has a place in society (when lies are employed to defend discretion), but hold that we should all have equal access to this, which means few will be interested in exposing the personal affairs of others (see: France). What makes American hypocrisy especially galling is the explosive mix of hypocrisy and self-righteousness (see: Haggert, Reid, Gingrich, Swaggert, etc.).

You could say that I am hypocrite, since I deffend fidelity and I don't practice it. Fair enough. But accepting your failures is not the same as seeing your failures as successes. If you fail an exam, it is better for you to know that you failed and that it is wrong, than to think that passing an exam is the same than failing it.

An alcoholic person can believe that it is better to be sober than to be drunk but he cannot quit the vice. It is better for him to believe that than to believe that drunkness is good. If the alcoholic thinks being drunk is bad, he will drink less booze and this is a belief which produces good results.

This is what ideals are for. To move in the right direction. Even if you don't achieve them completely.

So it is not hypocrisy. It is knowing that certains ways are better then others but the human animal is not strong enough to follow the right way.

We are biological programmed to be unfaithful. But we are biological programmed to be in a hunter-gatherer society and live in huts.

Society exists by curbing basic instincts who are wired into our brain. Curbing this basic instincts is not completely possible but, when you try, you have a society.

Every society in the history of the world is based on ideals which cannot be completely fulfilled: stealing is bad, murdering is bad, it is bad to cheat on your partner, it is bad to have an affair with a married woman, it is bad not to take care of your children...

These ideals are violated every day but violation is meant to be the exception, not the norm. And this makes society.

When you unleash human instincts, you return to something similar to the primitive society. Only loosening the taboo of monogamy has produced the black ghettos of the cities, lots of kids that do not know their fathers (being more prone to have psychological disorders and to have problems with the law than kids that) and a lot of people who is alone (since, in the primitive society, 20% of men monopolized 80% of the women, as DNA studies suggest). Western decline can be attributed to the unleashing of human instincts.

If hypocrisy is an essential element in keeping a system from collapsing – if, in other words, the system is founded on false premises – is this a system worth preserving?

No society is hypocrisy-free. Should every society in the history of the world collapse only because we must be intellectualy pure?

Should billions of people have to suffer only because we cannot distinguish between the desirable ideal and the weak human nature?

It is easy for you to take this radical approach, comfortably seated before your laptop and having a caffe late. But, if society collapses, nobody would be unaffected. Don't think that you would be spared of the ugly circumstances. If a society collapses, there won't be any ivory towers to hide.

So it is easy to say "If society collapses, so be it" and then take advantage of everything society gives to you (a Ph.D. for example - I also have one but in another area), a book, a blog, a house, the Internet, the food you have without hunting or harvesting.

As part of the intellectual elite, you (and I) are one of the more dependents human beings and you couldn't live without a society. It is easy for you to say that this system is not worth preserving while, at the same time, reaping all its benefits. And this, my friend, is true hypocrisy.

....with you about how you assume "black ghettoes" came about. They came about the same way Latino barrios or Indian reservations came about--because of racial and social discrimination, NOT because they were having too many babies out of wedlock. This answer is classic neo-con Republican hypocrisy. Not only do you neo-cons need to take pot-shots at anyone who doesn't adhere to an outmoded, 1950s standard of sexual behavior, but in the process you always need to take potshots at "negroes" (especially poor ones) because in your minds, they epitomize "sexual immorality".

I read a statistic, that more than 50% of men actually cheat on their wife - at least in their mind. So this "abnormal" social habit is not like murdering, a very very rare incident (not more than 25% of a population are murderers). I do agree though with other posts, who basically say, that this rule, not to cheat, is made for society to survive: What would happen, if every man would sleep with his neighbors wife?! We would have chaos, because jealousy is as much an instinct as polygamy. So this moral law of prohibiting cheating has its sense. But that doesn't mean, that society, the way it handles this at the moment, is the best way. Just think of prostitution. Prostitution already removes half of the negative impact of cheating. Instead of having two people going crazy (both partners of the cheaters), we "only" have one. So there might be better social models, in order to handle that in a more optimal way
I don't have any proposition though and I won't think about it, because I can't change anything anyway.